


Such chains as never was

by Lilliburlero



Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: Adultery, Age Difference, Bisexuality, Cheating, F/M, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Infidelity, Internalized Homophobia, Oral Sex, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Sexism, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-25 02:19:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10754715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Geordie has a gorgeous bit on the side. So why does he keep thinking about Sidney Chambers?





	Such chains as never was

**Author's Note:**

> Written after the broadcast of the first episode of series 3, and before the second. So a bit... canon adjacent on a number of details.

That was the thing about sex, Geordie thought, it blinded you. Literally. Eight years a detective, and at the touch of a good-looking lass's lips he'd forgotten glass was transparent. Anyone could have seen. He suppressed a cold shiver. He was probably all right even if they had: honour among coppers was a good deal thicker than among thieves. But if it got around, reached the wrong ears, Margaret could get the sack. Lucky she'd had a clear enough head to put a stop to it, because if it had been up to him he'd have stuck it into her there and then, or had her bent over the desk, skirt pushed up over her lovely round arse, knickers pulled down to her stocking-top—except it was _his_ desk you were talking about, and you couldn't really expect a glamourpuss like her to stand for having her nose shoved into the typebasket of an Olivetti 44 or one of four overspilling ashtrays. So it was all for the best, then, that she'd suggested he come to hers on Wednesday evening, which was when the girl she shared with went for tea with her mam in Meldreth. The only problem was getting through the next forty-eight hours unable to string three thoughts together without one of them being of Margaret's tits. And the semi-perpetual stiffie, of course. It was like being fourteen again, as were his snappish moods and shifty posture. He could have lived without Cathy choosing Tuesday night to nuzzle up to him in bed, and all. That wasn't in the manual, the wife who'd lost all interest in it suddenly showing an interest in it the day before he got to poke his bit on the side for the first time. He turned away from her, grumbling about a long day at work, ignoring her request for a cuddle because then she'd have noticed he was rock-solid, which wouldn't have been exactly easy to explain. He lurched out of bed and went to the bathroom, where he tossed off more quickly and guiltily than he had since he stopped believing in God. Why was he doing this, risking his marriage to the woman who'd saved him, seen the worth in him when he was a mental and physical wreck, who'd loved him faithfully and sweetly and humorously for nearly ten years, borne him four bonny bairns—why, for fuck's sake, why? The honest answer to that was so unsettling that it had the perverse effect of resolving him in his course.

His guilt had evaporated by the time he'd bought a pound box of Black Magic and a half-bottle of Gordon's gin—he'd like to have done things properly, brought flowers, but the pockets of his mac couldn't accommodate a bouquet, it was dicey enough as it was. He parked at the top of Norfolk Street and walked two streets over to Sleaford Street. Margaret's flat was in number 17, one of the larger houses in this area of low, huddling terraces with twitchy net curtains, the sort of place it was pure bloody murder to do door-to-door in because all the old dears noticed comings and goings in inverse proportion to their usefulness to an investigation. He didn't doubt he was being taken note of, and it made him nervous, even though no-one could possibly know what he had on his mind, and good thing too, because it was flagrantly obscene. He'd been dreading a landlady, so he saw with relief that the flat had its own doorbell (M. Ward  & E. Clarke, a neatly typed card sellotaped beside the button). He pressed it, thinking of the time he'd asked Sidney what the hell a rubicon was (for some reason he pictured small, bright, diamond-shaped tiles) and got about half an hour of ancient history in response. _It wasn't just that Caesar was gambling with his own life and those of all his men_ , Sidney had said, his voice slipping into the warm, narrative cadence that made the handful of his sermons that Geordie had heard something like a— _pleasure_ seemed a slightly indecent word to use about a sermon— _It was that he had finally to admit to himself that he was declaring war on the state, which for a Roman patrician was attacking everything you were, everything that made you you._

'Geordie?' 

She was there at the open door, looking bloody delectable in a fitted dark green frock with yellow trim, smiling her wide, cheeky smile. 

'Ah—all right, pet?' 

'Come in. You were miles away—no second thoughts?' 

'No fear. You look gorgeous, by the way.' The compliment seemed inadequate: it was nothing short of a miracle that she—quick-witted, smart and sexy, always perfectly turned out—wanted _him_ —shabby, craggy, twice her age, more or less, if he was a day. How old was she, anyway? Not thirty yet. He'd been so intent on his fantasies of her in the buff that it hadn't really occurred to him that he would be too: in his clothes, he cut a reasonable figure for fifty-one, but without them there was no disguising his hollowing chest, saggy arse and grainy skin, inevitable loss of muscle tone aggravated by those twenty-seven months of starvation and disease that had ended a decade ago, but you never got it back, even the young men didn't really get it back. And if her standards were set at the Chambers level—he could only hope there'd been one or two homelier specimens since then, cushion the drop-off a bit. He wondered how far things had got between her and Sidney; given his famous principles, maybe not too far, not much more than a snog and a feel. Geordie felt it almost as a disappointment, that Sidney hadn't preceded him here. He put the thought quickly away and followed her deliciously mobile rump up the stairs. 

'You're quiet,' she said. 'Something on your mind?' 

'Mm. You,' he said, not untruthfully. 

'I want to be on more than _that_. Come on in.' 

The sitting room was plainer than he imagined one shared by two women could be. No china kittens or milkmaids, no lace doilies, beadwork or pink lustreware, no chromolithographs of dewy-eyed hounds or ponies, no _Souvenir from Bognor_ or _Present from Robin Hood's Bay_ , no workbaskets bursting with half-finished bootees and bed-jackets. His ideas about how single career girls spent their free time when they weren't spreading their legs for middle-aged detective inspectors were probably, he reflected, a bit Edwardian. Everything was punctiliously clean: now it had been proven unfounded, he could acknowledge his fear of sluttishness. There was a bright tartan rug over the back of the old-fashioned sofa; the chair, new, sage-green and curvily uncomfortable, had clearly been painstakingly saved for out of someone's three pound ten a week. A mirror hung over the fireplace, a splashy modern print between tall windows on the opposite wall, beneath which was a small table with a portable gramophone on it. A low bookshelf held cheap paperbacks, a rack about a dozen LPs. The ones he could see looked improvingly classical, Miss Clarke's, he hoped. A couple of fashion magazines on the sludgily re-varnished coffee table were the only evidence of female habitation: otherwise, it reminded him a bit of Sidney's study, only brighter and less cluttered. 

Margaret closed the flat door behind her. 'I swear I don't know nuffink, Inspector, very quiet, always paid her rent on time, kept herself to herself, like.' 

He turned, wincing. 'Was I—?' 

'Just a bit. Exhibit A's under the kitchen sink.' 

'It's always under the kitchen sink. No imagination, the criminal classes.' He seized her shoulders and kissed her, more roughly than he'd meant, to start with, but she responded eagerly, slipping her hands in under his mac and jacket, pressing herself against him. He liked the scent she usually wore, musky but not too sultry, but she wasn't wearing it now, and a lot less make-up than she usually did. That was—thoughtful, but he didn't want to think about it. He let one hand slide down her back and rove over her bum. 

She pulled back and stroked his cheek and jaw. 'Steady on, there, soldier. Get your coat off first. Here, let me.' 

He retrieved the chocolates and the gin. 

'Ooh, lovely. Thank you. Would you like a drink? We've tonic and lemon, I think. And I got some bottles of Bass in, if you'd prefer that.' 

He didn't want a drink. He wanted to see her with her tits out, touch them and squeeze them. He wanted to part her thighs and touch her hot slit and shove his cock into it and roger her daft, and then he wanted to have time to do it all over again before he had to go back to warmed-over shepherd's pie and bathtime and potty-training and _Life with the Lyons_ and will-you-hear-Esme's-spellings-I'm-up-to-my-ears. (Turned out he'd been spelling 'freight' and 'fulfil' wrong for thirty-five years, and 'receive' would never look right. He supposed the typing pool silently corrected these things.) But he wanted to treat Margaret with respect too, she deserved better than this, really, better than him. And respect, for some reason, meant sitting for a quarter of a precious hour drinking drinks that neither of them—if the enthusiasm with which she'd crushed her tits up against his chest was anything to go by—really wanted. 

'Yes, all right. Bass—' 

She turned from the hook where she'd hung his coat, all pin-up pose and come-hither grin. 'Or we could just go straight to bed.' 

They stumbled, lips locked, to the right-hand one of two adjacent doors opposite the entrance. 

Her little bedroom was more feminine. There was one of those dressing-tables with an oval mirror and a frilly valence, on which stood a formidable casket of cosmetics, and a lace cover and a pink satin cushion on the single bed. But no mess, no drifts of powder or discarded stockings. Only a prospect this immediate of getting his end away could have dissuaded Geordie from examining the small collection of cheaply-framed photographs on the chest of drawers; did he do this whenever he went to someone's else's house? He supposed he did. It was appalling. Cathy might have said something. 

Margaret shifted in his arms. 'Unzip me?' 

The dress zipped down the back: he slid his hands under it to touch her tits through the silky material of slip and bra, kissing the back of her neck, pushing himself up against her bum so she could feel how hard he was. Even in her stockinged feet, she was of a height with him: he liked that, he'd always had a bit of a thing about tall, strong girls, especially if they were womanly in other ways, clothes, hair, make-up and all that. Funny that Sidney didn't seem to: his height and physique really needed an athletic woman, for balance, but he was in thrall to that scrap of an Amanda, who barely came up to his oxter. She'd torn Harland off him, though, despite being about seven stone wringing wet; there must be some reserves of strength there. _Jesus_ , call in St Jude for his toughest case ever. Couldn't even stop thinking about work for long enough to get out of his clothes and into the nicest bit of skirt he'd ever had. 

He loosened his tie (well, loosened it _more_ ) shrugged off his jacket and braces. Margaret pulled him into a kiss with his tie, then threw it aside and started on his shirt buttons. He reached for his fly and found his hand knocked away. She wasn't going to—oh, Christ on a flaming bike, she was. He felt giddy. His trousers fell around his ankles, and she dropped to her knees, pushing down his underpants into the pile of clothes at his feet. He still had his bloody shoes and socks on. He was a bloody idiot. He wasn't used to this. She stroked his cock a couple of times, firm priming strokes, and then, oh God, he was right in her mouth, deep in it, she'd taken the whole shaft of him almost straight away. He trembled, scared for a moment that he was going to spill, humiliatingly and pleasurelessly, right there, but he didn't, it was okay. He still wasn't fucking used to this, and he wasn't sure he could take it. Cathy sucked him sometimes, or she used to, but always when they were horizontal, rolling and messing about. And Cathy gagged easily, so she licked and worked the tip of it a lot: that was grand, it was where the sensation was anyway. The last time someone had knelt in front of him and just gobbled it down, practised and efficient, he'd been backed up against a cassia tree with the perpetual racket of the jungle in his ears. He looked up at the ceiling, an ordinary English ceiling in a converted Victorian house, the moulding yellowed and peeling. He shut his eyes and let out a long, shuddering breath. There were hands on his buttocks, encouraging him to thrust; he still feared that when he looked down the head would be fair, red-gold. He feared, too, before he could stop himself, that it wouldn't. 

It was Margaret's dark hair, waved and set, crisp under his hand, and all was right with the world. Men would kill for the sight of her lips stretched around their pricks. 

'Eh, pet, get up.' 

She made a noise indicating willingness to continue. 

'Naw, I want to give you a bit of a good time too, don't I?' 

She got to her feet and took off her slip, sprawling on the bed as he got out of his remaining clothes. His face grew hot as he fished the packet of three from his jacket and put it on the bedside locker, but she grinned appreciatively. He lay down on the bed beside her. 

'It's all right, actually. Dutch cap. But you're a gent to think of it. Most blokes don't give a hoot.' She put on a wheedling voice. ' _It's like taking a bath in oilskins_ , and of course _he's_ always the man in a thousand who can pull out in time.' 

'It's not—bath in oilskins, I mean. Tell your young lads that from an OAP. But it's nicer not to have to.' 

She swatted him. 'I'm not that sort of girl. I'm some sort of girl, all right, but not quite that sort.' 

'You're the right sort for me.' He put his arm around her and unhooked her bra. Her breasts outdid even his fevered imaginings: firm handfuls, the nipples plump and dark pink; a slight unevenness only adding to the charm. 'You're beautiful. A proper bobby-dazzler.' 

He kissed her neck as he fondled her tits, marvelling at the creamy resilience of her skin. He'd never had a woman so young, he realised, not ever: Cathy was younger than him, but she'd been in her mid-thirties when they met. Before the war the women, at least, had always been older. Even his first, when he was fifteen, had been over thirty. He didn't know what it was—his younger self had answered something maternal in them, maybe—but he'd been catnip to a certain sort of handsome, hard-boiled woman in early middle age. It was a lot less effort than chasing young lasses, so he went along with it, had a fair good time. They were usually married, which had more up-sides than down. And now, here he was, the older, the married one. 

Margaret was playing with his cock again, so he let his hand slide down her belly and into her knickers—yellow silk and off-white lace, not too fancy, he approved. It had to be up there with the world's best pleasures, the first time you put your hand inside a woman's knickers, feeling the texture of her hair (coarse, springy), parting her soft, slick flesh (she gasped and said his name), finding her clit (tiny, barely a pea—for some reason he had expected a plump inch). There were only one or two things that compared, and you couldn't do them with women, so they were better not thought about. 

She reached for her stocking-tops. 

'Keep them on a minute, pet.' He loved the feel of the nylon and the tender bulge of thigh above it. He pushed her knickers down partway and rubbed her with his thumb, this time putting his index finger inside her. When she writhed and whimpered he brought his middle finger to join it, imagining his cock sliding in among the tight, hot ridges. It was a temptation, just to tear down her knickers and suspenders and get to it: his cock was pulsing, leaking a drop of clear fluid. But he'd promised her a good time and he wanted it to be the best she'd ever had; for frequency, he could never compete with a lad her age—if he could do it twice this evening it would be a miracle—but for finesse, well, he flattered himself that all those game old mazers had taught him something, back in the prehistoric era generally known as the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties. 

Margaret wriggled out of her undies; he rolled her onto her back and gave her the satin cushion to put into the small of her back. He spread her thighs wide, getting a good eyeful of pretty brown-pink cunt before he put his tongue to work. It was funny how every woman tasted different, and the same woman could taste different depending on the time of the month, but the taste of cunt was still sort of a universal. Not like fish, he'd never known why fellas said that. More like rabbit stew. Coney—perhaps they were whatsit—etymologically—related? Sidney would know, and he'd probably be amused to be asked. He'd have to wait until he saw him in mufti, though. You couldn't say 'cunt' to a dog collar. 

'Geordie—you don't have to—' 

He bloody well did have to, though. He wanted to be good to her, treat her well. But also, less high-mindedly, to bind her to him, keep her coming back. Show her that there was life in the old hound yet, and a few new tricks. He was aware too, at some murky level, that he was compensating for Sidney's rejection of her. Inexplicable, he thought, throwing _this_ over for Amanda's washboard ribs and pancake arse, except Sidney wasn't getting those either, only doing a note-perfect, A-1, top-hole, copper-bottomed impersonation of someone who was, and had been throughout Mrs Hopkins' short marriage, fathering a bastard on the way. It struck him—not for the first time, but more forcibly than ever before—what extraordinary peril Sidney had got himself into. It only took the Upper Class Twit to get fed up and start divorce proceedings, and some hack at the _News of the World_ would suddenly find all his Christmases had come at once. And if that happened, it was all fucking U.P. with a vengeance. You couldn't imagine Sidney without the Church; well, maybe he could join the force. No, it would kill him, to lose his licence, not be able to exercise his ministry, because that was what would happen, wouldn't it, if he was named as co-respondent in a divorce case? And there wouldn't be a damn thing Geordie could do to protect him, or offer comfort. Maybe there was—one thing. Comfort was what he and Terry had given each other, at Taungzun, and it had got one of them through to the other side. But it wasn't comparable, all the rules were suspended there, whereas back home in England, rules were what it was all about, rules were the issue, the problem. And anyway, Sidney wasn't like him, he was pretty sure of that. Sidney was normal, normal through and through, so normal he was a bit abnormal, in fact, since in Geordie's experience most men, more than half, anyway, deprived for whatever reason of women— _Jesus Christ to buggery fuck_ what was he fucking thinking about Sidney fucking Chambers for? Again. And with his nose buried in Margaret Ward's sweet gash. Well, your mind did tend to wander, when you did some of the less mutual stuff in bed. Who knew what Margaret was thinking about, up there? He hoped it wasn't Sidney Chambers. It was _Geordie_ she was saying between those gratifying little cries and moans, though, and that would have to do. He redoubled his efforts to get her there, and with aching jaw and dewy face, finally did. 

She drew him up beside her. 'You're lovely,' she said, planting small kisses under his ear. 'Lovely, lovely, lovely.' 

He realised just in time that a quip about a sharp tongue sometimes ensuring domestic harmony wouldn't be at all welcome, and grunted, 'You're the lovely one. I could do that all bloody night.' 

'No fella ever—bothered before. I mean, I can do for myself, so I don't want for anything, as such—' 

'Stick wi us, wor kidda.' Saying that felt like he was talking to the little sister he didn't—thank God—have, but Cathy was _wor lass_ until death did them part, there wasn't any way around that. 'Us clapped-out gadgies still have some uses.' 

'You're not. You're super,' she said, fervently, reaching down to his prick, which had gone a bit soft; it sprang to her touch, though, and he took slightly shameful advantage of her gratitude, turning her over and fucking her from behind, slapping her arse and parting the cheeks to look at her perfect, puckered, plum-bloom arsehole. And he could say, with entire and total honesty, that neither that time, nor three-quarters of an hour later, when—after a brief kip—she got up on him and rode him lazily to her climax (not his: he was fairly flabbergasted at being hard enough in the first place) he didn't think of Sidney Chambers once. Not even once.


End file.
